Any advice? How short is too short and how long interfers with eating?
Ye gods. If you have NO experience doing this, PLEASE go to a vet and get it done professionally. Much less stress on you, and the vet. They’ll gladly explain it to you, and give you the best guidelines. The little birdies crush and break very, very easily if you are not extraordinarily careful.
If you MUST do it yourself, check out a few animal care books in the library. “Bird Talk” magazine has some helpful articles on beak care, but I don’t know if they have a website or not.
I’ve spent time trimming all sizes of bird beak, from parakeets to macaws, and each one is different. Generally, you should be able to tell from the proportion of the beak to the proportion of the head as to the correct length. Watch the bird as it eats, and see if its beak interferes with its foot/beak coordination as it manipulates the food. You can generally get a good impression from the detritus on the bottom of the cage – too many unhulled seeds, or mutilated fruit gobblets can signify too long of a beak.
But please… spend the money once, go to a vet and get instruction. Its the safest way.
I’ve never seen a bird in my vet’s office. Do all vets handle birds or do vets specialize? My parakeet’s beak has always looked like he’s got an overbite yet he seems to eat OK. Any cites for a picture of how long is too long?
Also:
if you’ve got a nice cuttlebone in the budgie’s cage, he’ll work on it and and decrease the number of times he needs his beak trimmed…
Thanks, I’ll get them one.
We were succesfull last night. I’ll watch for dropped food.
Avian medicine is a different ball of wax than your typical dog and cat stuff, and the vet needs to be specially trained in dealing with birdies. Avian vets are becoming more common, but you will still have to check with any given vet to make sure they will take birds.
Heh. I thought you were talking about your nose!
I had a parakeet for ten years and he never once needed his beak or nails trimmed. I kept him supplied with cuttlebone and perches made of texture concrete and hard wood and those seemed to keep him in shape pretty well.
DO NOT DO IT YOURSELF. You can seriously injure your bird this way if you cut it too short or break it (birds’ beaks CAN be broken; a family friend had an African grey whose lower mandible got snapped in half). There are a ton of nerve endings inside the beak - it’s not just an overgrown toenail, it’s your bird’s way of feeding itself and feeling the world around it since it has no hands!
Observe your bird to see if the beak is causing problems with eating, as Noelq posted. (It’s surprising how weird a beak can get without causing problems; my father’s African grey’s upper mandible developed this weird overbite where the too-long bit went over one side of the lower jaw instead of down the middle, and he was ok for a month while my dad tried to locate an avian vet within driving distance that would fix the beak - their normal vet didn’t do birds and their normal bird vet didn’t want to do the beak.)